Police Brutality and the Targeting of Minorities

What are the causes and effects of police brutality and racial targeting have on minority
communities?
Aaron OSullivan
Global Studies and World Language Academy at Tallwood

Police Brutality and the Targeting of Minorities

Abstract
Police brutality is a serious problem in the world today which, which may be the result of
racial biases and police training tactics. This topic is a hot button issue that has plagued America
for quite some time now, particularly in minority communities. Recently, there have been an
increase in police officers being caught using racial bias when policing, which has caused a great
deal of controversy. The paper focuses on this issue along with providing some insight into both
sides of the argument to create as fair and balanced a paper like this can be. This paper focuses
on statistical evidence to support the idea that police are, at the very least, targeting minorities
especially those of African descent. The numbers supporting that detail become even stronger
when information about the population and arrest rates are presented in the paper and its quite
alarming. The study of this paper required a mixture of research, both online and independently,
and some usage of personal experiences from people who have been a part of this from both
sides. The findings focus on the effects of police misconduct and how people believe we should
move forward in order to tackle this issue more effectively. This data is valuable for those who
want reform in how police officers go about policing and for individuals that would like for our
law enforcement officials to treat all Americans equally under the law.

Intro
Recently, weve seen an increasing amount of egregious acts of police brutality against
minorities, and it seems as if its not going to stop any time soon. Why are these acts of excessive
force happening on such a frequent basis? I feel as if both sides hold some truth, but the issue
isnt solely one issue or another; its a combination of various factors that have led to the rise of

Police Brutality and the Targeting of Minorities

police misconduct being caught on camera. This is far from a simple problem, so we are going to
need a complex solution to fix an equally convoluted and complex problem.
The media has covered this topic over the years but its gaining more traction
recently,with the release of several tapes showing young African American being gunned down
by cops for dubious motives. With movements like, #BlackLivesMatter and #JusticeOrElse,
many people, particularly in the African American community, are disgusted with recent acts of
violence by the hands of police, and are speaking up about it. Many individuals in the African
American community feel that the acts of police brutality are racially motivated, while many
whites feel as if its a police training problem or no problem at all. (Perez, 2015)
The police, to some, have seemed a bit numb to the killings and the fact they are still
happening at such a high rate is quite alarming. One of the major reasons for the outrage is the
facts that many of the police who kill unarmed minorities are almost never held accountable for
their actions, such as the officers who beat up Rodney King in LA or the officer who killed Oscar
Grant in Oakland, and both was caught on camera. That fact alone has sparked as much or more
outrage than the actual killings have.

Methodology
To find reliable information on the controversial topic of police brutality against
minorities, a variety of methods were used to obtain accurate data for the paper. This is a tricky
topic to find actual facts instead the opinions of others, whether they stand by police or by the
minorities, presented as if they were facts. Extensive research was completed on various search
engines for relevant data to collect, including using websites such as Google, Bing and Yahoo.
Using key words like racial bias, police brutality or police bias in the advanced search
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Police Brutality and the Targeting of Minorities

engine of google really helped me find some valuable material on the subject, and brought some
new perspective to this issue for me. Along with online research, books were used to discover
more information about police tactics and crime rates that could suggest some bias. These books
were quite helpful in providing statistical analysis on police tendencies in a non-biased way.
Personal research was also conducted about this intriguing topic. A variety of tactics were
used including conducting interviews, and making observations of police interactions with
minorities and majorities to see if there was any difference in how they were treated. I took notes
on what I saw and tried to observe from a far. I also talked to some former police officers and
asked them about police training tactics and whether or not there were racial biases in the
training or in the workplace in general. Great deals of biases were uncovered in the police force
but it was mostly in the workplace environment and the training was just assisting to the biases.
Also, a few people who felt that they were racially targeted by police during traffic stops were
asked their opinion on the matter. According the stories, in many instances the officers had
stopped them on small charges and the situation escalated afterwards. Sometimes the escalated
situations resulted in more charges and other times there werent any additional charges pressed
onto them for their transgressions. Either way the people that were interviewed felt as if they
were treated unfairly by police.

Limitations
Even with the intense and extensive research conducted for this project there had
been a few limitations due to the subject matter. Its not easy to provide proof of bad intentions
of people. Obviously, there is not a way to truly know whether a person is giving out accurate
information, even if a lie detector was used. Outside of that its very hard to know if the
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Police Brutality and the Targeting of Minorities

information being brought to me is a hundred percent reliable, and that goes for any interview.
Many assumptions were made based on pieces of data that suggest one thing or another, to make
conclusions on this issue. Even the data could have been skewed as well but that is a more
reliable than the interviews, but it also lacks the depth that interviews provided.
Unfortunately, many police officers were unavailable to answer questions, or just
didnt want to be bothered. This unfortunate circumstance robbed me of more insight and
perceptive into how police officers think while on the job and the role racial bias plays in
everyday policing. There was also limitations to relying on a lot of opinionated arguments from
both sides on this issue and it was hard to de-cypher facts from some of the most blatantly biases
sources. This project is mostly a psychological one so many of the points that are made are
educated guesses based on psychiatric analysis, but there isnt any sure fire way to know the
whole truth, especially when most of the cases were found online and there is no way for me to
contact those involved in many of the situations.

Literature Review
There was a lot of information on the controversial topic of police brutality and the
effects of it. There has been an upsurge in reports of police killing unarmed minorities for little
to no reason which has led to many protests against corrupt policing. Nevertheless, there have
been some efforts to uncover biases that officers may have been previously unaware of. The
training is gaining more traction among police departments in dozens of cities, including
Philadelphia and Dallas, especially after recent protests over the killings of black men by white
officers sparked a debate about the role race plays in policing. (Abdullah, 2015) This article was
very helpful in the insight of police officers and how they are trying to change in order to better
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Police Brutality and the Targeting of Minorities

protect the community. It provided the thought process of progressive police training and how it
could be potentially impactful in ridding the police of biases, whether they are conscious or
unconscious. Officers need to make sure "that our language doesn't unintentionally reinforce
biases that have been passed on to us because we had the same thing passed on to us," said
Luann Pannell, director of training and education for the Los Angeles Police
Department.(Abdullah, 2015)
However, there are people who question the effectiveness of a truly unbiased
police training. Many people think its impossible to completely rid someone of a prejudice that
they created or learned over time. Fridell's program tries to teach police officers to recognize
their own implicit biases - that is, the biases that they don't realize they have. They do roleplaying - simulated police calls in which the officers jump to the wrong conclusions about who
the real troublemakers are. (Kaste, 2015) This quote is insightful because it is in depth about
the goals of the training and the direction that they are trying to go into in order to train law
enforcement officers more effectively. This article is basically an entire interview with several
officers who discuss the usefulness of these sensitivity trainings. This interview is extremely
helpful because it provides proper insight into how some officers think and the sense of apathy
some seem to display.
The North Carolina department of justice has statistics on the arrest rates in the
largest county of the state, Charlotte. The statistics show that even though black people only
make up about thirty two percent of the people inside of Charlotte they have been arrested more
than any other race has. Whites make up fifty nine percent of the population but five thousand
less people of European descent were arrested than those of African descent.(View Traffic Stop
Statistics, 2015) This website was incredibly useful on the facts of what could be racial bias in
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policing. Another alternative could be based on economic background just as much as ethnic
background. About sixty percent of the blacks that were arrested were below the poverty line,
while only thirty four percent of the whites arrested were poor. This information just opened a
new avenue that has not been brought up; do police have a bias towards those who are less
fortunate

Body
Many African American males feel as if theyre being unfairly targeted by law
enforcement officials in their own nation. This feeling of unwarranted discrimination is not
limited to men of African descent, it extends into other minorities in this country, including
Latino Americans (specifically Mexican), Muslim Americans and poor Americans. Recently, a
lot has been made about police killing unarmed Black men for reasons that seem questionable at
best. People in the media have raised an eyebrow about these killings and have called into
question the training that law enforcement officers receive and whether or not these heinous
actions are being taught or if these instances are just cases of rogue officers. As the number of
racially based killings rise, so will the amount of animosity towards police; this was already high
before these recent acts of alleged racism. Along with minorities, police will also have to face
more and more intense scrutiny from the media at large.
Instances such as the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri or the death of
Freddie Gray in Baltimore, Maryland, have further created a divide between police and
communities of color in our nation. Sixty four percent of African Americans have little to no
trust in police (Olsen, 2014) which is a direct result of what many people see as abuses of power
executed by police officers in situations it seemed unnecessary to use lethal force. These recent
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Police Brutality and the Targeting of Minorities

controversies have raised a simple question, why? Why are these killings happening? Why is
there a lack of accountability of law enforcement officials? What is causing these actions to
continuously happen? The questions that people seem to overlook are What are the
psychological reasons that police officers are killing unarmed black men? and Is this racial bias
or is this a completely different issue altogether?
We as a society have to recognize that police are people too, which means that
they do at times make mistakes. While it would be foolish to portray all police officers in a
negative light, we cannot overlook the fact that we have a serious problem with rogue cops.
These bad apples are painting a very ugly picture of police and are creating more uneasiness in
minority communities that, in most cases, didnt have a great deal of faith in their local police to
begin with. These recent tragedies are reopening old wounds in many minority communities,
which feel these killings are very reminiscent of police tactics used in the 1960s against
minorities. These actions have understandably caused much outrage. Many African Americans
feel as if they are being targeted by police more often than their white counterparts. from 2012
to 2014, 85% of people subject to vehicle stops by Ferguson police were African-American; 90%
of those who received citations were black; and 93% of people arrested were black. This while
67% of the Ferguson population is black. (Perez, 2015)
People are very fed up with the current justice system and the lack of
accountability held against law enforcement officials. There have been investigations into the
police departments in cities like Ferguson, New York, and recently Chicago. While the Chicago
Police Department is currently being investigated, there has been a pattern that suggests racial
bias in the arrest rates of people based on ethnicity in both New York and Ferguson. These
revelations have created more doubt and distrust in the integrity of the police departments in both
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Police Brutality and the Targeting of Minorities

respective cities. According to US Attorney General Loretta Lynch, lack of trust between police
and their communities, "makes it more difficult to gain help within investigations, to encourage
the victims and the witnesses of crime to speak up and to fulfill the most basic responsibilities of
public-safety officials," (Babin & Turner, 2015) The increased level of mistrust may have in turn
made it harder for police to capture criminals because many citizens lack faith in their police
departments. Some people feel as if cops are as corrupt as the criminals they try to put away.
Clearly, this is a serious issue because most police officers do their job the right way and have
done a fabulous job of protecting communities. Unfortunately for them, rogue officers have
helped portray the police as villains, especially in minority communities.
Police brutality usually doesnt just come from the actions of one trigger happy
officer; it usually is a culture of racism and discrimination that allows officers to commit these
crimes with the full backing of the police department. It is widely viewed by the outside world
that the police departments are trying to protect on of their own instead of providing real justice.
Some citizens feel as if the actions of the police are being swept under the rug until enough
uproar is caused in order for damaging evidence to be released to the public. For example,
citizens of the city of Baltimore have long felt that their police department engages in bully
like behavior towards citizens of color, but only until the killing of Freddie Gray have national
media outlets began to discuss the totality and long standing history of injustice done in that city.
(Friedersdorf, 2015)
Even though this situation may seem bleak, there is a glimmer of hope that needs
to be expounded upon. Some police departments have been proactive and are requiring all
officers, experienced and inexperienced, to take sensitivity trainings in an attempt to de-escalate
tension between members of the police force and minorities. These trainings are designed to give
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Police Brutality and the Targeting of Minorities

officers of different ethnic backgrounds more understanding of other cultures that exist within
their city and how to better police civilians. Some training suggests that you have to adjust to the
communities while being fair and unbiased in order to better police their respective cities. Cities
like Seattle have created programs to train police to fair. The program in Seattle is called Fair
and Impartial Policing with the goal to eliminate many socio-economical biases and prejudices.

Naturally, many people are skeptical, at best, that these sensitivity trainings will
make a positive impact how law enforcement officers police civilians. People like Kent Police
Sergeant Robert Hollis believe that the trainings are really dumb. He goes on to explain that
police officers need to create biases in order just to stay alive in the line of duty, because one
miscalculation could mean your life. This comes from a high ranking sergeant in Kent, who
happens to be an African American male. (Kaste, 2015) Biases are nothing new and, according to
a study from Joshua Correll from the University of Colorado, where he conducted an experiment
on how people perceive threats through a shoot, dont shoot video game stated that People are
much more likely to shoot a black target than a white target, regardless of what he's holding, and
they're much faster to shoot an armed black target than they are to shoot an armed white
target.(Kaste, 2015) However the same report also shows that veteran police officers have
shown more a hesitation to pull the trigger in simulations compared to ordinary people and
younger cops. Does this mean that many of these actions are just blunders made by young cops?
Or is there something more sinister that is going on?
Unconscious bias is one of the hardest biases to erase because its in the
subconscious of a persons mind, making the information hard to retrieve. This is likely a major
cause for acts of police brutality along with , simply, bad men who became police officers. This
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Police Brutality and the Targeting of Minorities

is an issue that is going to very hard to fix because its not a black and white scenario, like
ones in yesteryear, but the situation now is very grey and lacks the ease of separation of good
and wrong. While many people feel as if police brutality is an issue, there are equal amounts that
feel as if the issue is fabricated and racial bias is good for policing. Simply put, this situation will
not be resolved in a quick manner. It may take years, decades or, even, centuries for this issue to
be resolved, but its up to the people to decide if this is an issue to fight over. There have been
investigations conducted by the Department of Justice on tactics used by police and they have
found that there have been patterns which imply racism in cities like New York, Ferguson, and
Baltimore. (Knafo, 2014) These cities have had some history of racial divides in the past so this
is nothing new in these communities. Have old ways of thinking influenced todays police?
Maybe, that could be a cause for the growing increase of excessive use of power by law
enforcement.
Another potential reason for these unfortunate actions could be the result of a culture that
loves to use guns. America has long been a nation that embraces the right to bear arms but this
right has had some nasty effects as well. Since arms are so accessible to people in America
criminals are able to get their hands on them and use them for bad things like robberies, murders,
etc. Occasionally criminals will get into gunfights with police and which could become fatal for
all parties involved. Incidents, like the one previously described, have steered the government to
militarize the police of all major cities. The increase of weaponry may play a role in how
comfortable cops are to use deadly force then they felt before. Militarization of police have
created a since of oppression to the people who are constantly in the crosshairs of law
enforcement, many of whom are law abiding citizens. Riots and protests, like the ones in LA in

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1992 or Ferguson in 2014, were only increased when the presence of police with military grade
weaponry was felt. (Flatow, 2014)

Conclusion
Police misconduct is an issue in America that needs to be resolved as quickly as possible.
This issue is going to continue unless affirmative action is taken by the government, whether it is
at the local, state, or federal level. Police should not use deadly force unless there is a clear and
present danger to them or civilians. Many people within minority communities feel as if police
do not do that enough when dealing with people within that community. The role of police is to
enforce the law but now it seems that some of them are breaking the law, all in the name of
enforcing it. A great deal of attention has been put on this issue but this time people are expecting
a change to the system to hold police officers more accountable for their actions and to train
these officers to be as unbiased as humanly possible. Through trainings and positive experience
unbiased training should be able to work, to create a police force that actually protects and serves
all people equally.
The cause of the issue, however, remains very complex and fluid. The cause of these
actions is just as important as learning how to end the practices used, because you have to
understand the root of the problem in order to solve the problem. The concern is that there are
too many causes of this issue whether it be institutionalized racism, or a persons upbringing or
association by past experiences, this issue will not be easily resolved. Even though the resolution
will be hard its up to the people to decide whether enough is enough, and that black lives really
do matter, and that institutionalized racism will no longer define America. If the day comes when

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Americans rise up, united as one, to rally behind the end of police cruelty, will the actions come
to its demise.

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